The Isle of Seven Moons/Chapter 19

by Robert Gordon Anderson

 

CHAPTER XIX

THE CAFÉ OF MANY TONGUES

As if the torments of his own fire were past enduring, the Sun, who all day had blistered the red roofs and pavements of the tropical sea-port, dropped like a red-hot stove-lid behind the mountain and into the sea. The last little lizard scurried over the burning stones of the courtyard, panting for relief. It seemed as if all the windows and doors of Heaven had been shut, and even with nightfall only a little coolness seeped through, to give promise of relief in the later watches.

In the street outside the café walls, a tired donkey with head sinking below the level of the crude shafts, plodded on the last lap of his journey. Skulking, rib-slatted curs and half-naked children sprawled over the door sills or on the broken sidewalks, dabbling their brown and yellow toes in the green half-dried up puddles that spread over the ill-defined gutters. Fat, girdleless brown women offered the fluent nourishment of pouchy breasts to their all-naked youngest born, and under their striped awnings native shopkeepers drowsed. their heads sinking lower and lower until they banged against the white walls of their bazaars, waking them to a half-torpid consciousness. The flames of sickly lamps shone on low-foreheaded coolies, with tarnished rings in their ears, negresses with bold preying eyes, and the equally predatory but subtler glances of soft-eyed quarter and half-bloods. Now and then a derelict Spaniard or American, in white as limp as their persons and morals, sagged along in the polyglot crowd, always stopping when the way was blocked, not having enough energy to elbow a passage through, and rich only in eternities of time, which they could not barter for the vicious pleasures of the place.

Locked arm in arm with Phil and with MacAllister, whose tall bloodless face and figure, at last clothed in white, seemed cool as ever even in the all-developing heat, walked Carlotta. There was just a little of the old swagger left. The boy walked unsteadily, and his blood-shot eyes were dull and heavy except when they picked out in the sluggish stream the lazy grace of some full-curved figure, faintly outlined by the light of a half-drunken street-lamp, or the summoning eye of a handsome quadroon, velvety and full of languid allure even in the darkness of the unlighted spaces.

The uneven stones of the street were hard on Carlotta's stilted French heels. She was very hot, and the subterranean V of her sheer waist gave her the appearance of greater nakedness than the frank-bosomed mothers in the doorways, whom her impudent black eyes scorned.

She had romped in a tropical village once for three months, but then there were little rows of electric bulbs, and an orchestra playing in front, and well-barbered youths in ultra suits, waiting at the stage door. As different as a patent medicine man's open-air clinic from a city hospital in an epidemic, was that stage village from this swart, stark, sweaty, though colourful, mass of humanity. They were like worms in a fisherman's bait-can, or coagulated reptiles writhing in a noisome everglade. Perhaps, if someone had taken the bait-can and dumped the contents into one of the Five Boroughs, Carlotta would have sanctioned their existence. Her big city could do no wrong. Its great mantle can cover all ugliness and squalor.

"My Gawd, boys, why did you ever bring me from N'Yawk to this sink-hole!"

Phil jerked his arm from her. Now that half-Spanish girl (he mentally called the exotic beauty "a peach") who had looked back! Why—well—Carlotta bored him tonight. Pettishly he upbraided her:

"You make me sick, always grouching about something."

Stung by this slur, after all her patient devotion, the dancer retorted:

"You're the grouch with all that bad whiskey under your belt. You ought to go easy on the rotten stuff they ladle out here."

MacAllister was more worried about that peculiar flush on the boy's face than the whiskey. He knew the fevers that lurked in these luckless places. But his voice, the cool est thing in the panting town that night, soothed their irritation.

"Don't lose your nerve—we'll be off in the morning. There's more aurent gazooks in that island, my little babes in the wood, than your innocent hearts ever dreamed of."

The disgusted girl jeered at him in discordant slang phrases that added still another note to the polyglot noises of the street.

"Isn't he the cute little dreamer! For the luv o' Mike, Mac, change your brand. Do you mean to tell me that you expect to strike gold in that place? To blazes with your fairy stories and your phoney islands."

"It's like Heaven compared to Atlantic City, that apogee of your ballyhoo soul, Carlotta, so" (he descended) "don't get cold feet now.".

"Cold feet—huh—they blister and burn and smart—ouch! and never a corner drug store where a soul can get footease of any sort."

The gambler left them to their wrangling, and they sauntered slowly up the street until they came to an ancient and crazily-leaning doorway, built of stone, in the Sixteenth Century Spanish style of the early discoverers.

"This is the place," he said, "hope the rest are there. Believe me, Desdemona, it's worth a gold-chest like Rockerfeller's—wrangling that crew."

They turned from the street and all its noises and smells and colours into the courtyard of "The Café of Many Tongues." The proprietor, with some shadow of truth, at least as far as the period was concerned, always claimed that the stone building whose narrow windows commanded the courtyard had been built by Ponce de Leon himself. But there was visible no healing water such as the wearied Castilian sought, only the signs of old age and decrepitude, and in the shadow of the walls little puddles like those in the street outside, not quite absorbed by the heat and still filled with green slime and lurking promise of pestilence.

On the harbour-side, an archway in the wall led to a flight of steps worn by the travel of countless smugglers, freebooters, and unclassified cutthroats of the past centuries. The stairway descended to a little wharf, by whose side a native rowboat and a launch rose and fell in the water gently lapping against the stone walls. Through the doorway, the port lights of a nondescript tramp steamer and their own trim yacht gleamed in the roadstead.

In the new-born breeze from off the waters, the trees began to whisper. The hum of conversation, like but more musically modulated than the drone of insects, rose in the courtyard, with an occasional epithet in some strange dialect, or northern oath, from the ill-assorted group of natives, sailors, derelicts and adventurers, who gave "The Café of Many Tongues" its name.

Passing between the rows of twinkling cigarettes, they chose a place in the favouring shadows of the wall fronting the street. A depression in the yard rendered useless the fourth leg, whose see-saw tilt enraged Phil in his present irritable mood, and he snarled out some cursing criticism of the place, loudly demanding a waiter.

Instead of an obsequious, false-shirt-fronted attendant, came a graceful langourous girl with sparks of temper, the adopted daughter of the proprietor and evidently a favourite with the old patrons of the place, who called her "Linda,"^[1] which in their tongue means "the beautiful one."

"Not when Monsieur speaks like that," she said in musically accented English, and turned towards the two new guests who were taking their places at the adjoining table. One was a Frenchman in the customary white of the island, dressed with that scrupulous attention to the person of the well-bred which shows a proper regard for reasonable conventions, stopping well on the right side of foppishness. Perhaps this care also served to cover a slenderness of purse and wardrobe. The effortless grace of his manner, too, fell short of that extravagance considered by the untravelled as characteristic of his race.

The other stranger, rougher in exterior, was a native of the island, but a fellow countryman by descent, with the look of one who gained a haphazard living from the seas.

"Sh," whispered Carlotta, "that's intrestin'."

The seafaring man sat directly facing their table. Even in the slumberous, torpid shadows of the place, his eyes gleamed with the expectant look of one about to drive a hard and profitable bargain. The other sat at right-angles to him.

The girl Linda hovered over him with an amorous interest in her smouldering eyes, which was not lost on Carlotta, although she couldn't hear the words the former said to him, and wouldn't have understood if she had.

"Monsieur has not come to 'The Café of Many Tongues' for oh—ever so long! I—we are all so happy to see you again," was the exact translation, and Carlotta hit somewhere near the truth when she whispered to the motionless MacAllister:

"Mabel's askin the Count where's he been since last Saturday night and what dames he was out with. Now she's pullin' the broken-heart stuff an' she means part of it anyway. But run away, girlie, you're wastin your time. He's nice and polite, but he'll never fall for you."

It was a shrewd, unconscious paraphrase and judgment, for the stranger answered Linda with a well-gauged courtesy that didn't satisfy the hunger in those lovely eyes at all. Still, as she took the order, she let her hand fall with a designed carelessness on his shoulder, and once on his dark hair, which held the wave that all women envy and childishly love to fondle. But he never responded to the mute appeal.

At last Linda deigned to take their own order, Carlotta whispering to the girl to substitute a less vicious drink for the inflaming native concoction Phil ordered. When she returned they sipped their liquor in silence, hoping for some revelation of the stranger's presence in this place. Had he deliberately followed them from Boston to Salthaven and from there to this unfrequented port? That was not quite the solution, for his dreaming, somewhat downcast gaze never searched the courtyard or even cast a glance towards their table. They drew their chairs back further within the shadows of the many-fissured wall and the whispering tree whose trunk rose between the two tables, and listened intently. The low well-modulated voices did not carry to the listeners, and the only stray expressions they caught were in French.

Carlotta gruffly whispered:

"What was the matter with you, Mac, that you didn't learn to pollyvransey in all your travels?"

As the stranger sat at right-angles to the wall, with an old-world air of distinction and outworn romance, Carlotta quite forgot the heat, her blistered feet, and all her troubles, in speculating about his mystery.

"He's had a past—by heck—he's had a past! Lost all his fortune at cards. Old Duke Guy disinherits him. Lady Leonore weeps oodles, then hitches to the old Marky with the gout and his ropes of poils. There you have it, and now he roams and roams the world, singin' 'Farewell for ever me own troo luv?' But he's got nerve enough behind—if somebody'd only jar him out of his pipe-dreams."

She was probably only half-wrong in her rough reading, for the lighted match which he held to his cigarette now revealed the face, turned three-quarters towards them, with its olive hue of South-eastern France and its almost feminine grace of contour. In the light of a later match, quite as in Queer Hat's Studio, one was relieved to note that this delicacy of feature was saved by the courageous mouth and firm foundation of the jaw. Perhaps a more expert physiognomist than Carlotta would have said that the inherited melancholy of a line doomed to a century's continued misfortunes had in him darkened to a sombre fatalism—possibly with a final and crushing catastrophe. Had he in addition to his discernment possessed a strain of the romantic, he might have added that never had the sword of this spirit actually rusted. It was only sheathed in the sadness of those dark eyes, and could flash forth right royally if the occasion came.

The final flicker of the match fell on an object of greater interest to the watching conspirators than the melancholy foreigner himself. It was a small rectangular piece of paper, which the host was explaining to his companion.

The seafaring man moved his chair a little, and the oil-flare on the other side of the table cast a circle of light, a little paler than the paper itself, which was yellow with age. They saw that there were faint indications of outlines upon it.

The seafaring man studied it, looked up at the other's question, assumed a look of honest calculation. He then began a series of shrugs and gestures, thrusting his upheld fingers before the other's face, perhaps to indicate time or price. This was but the preliminary stage of the bargain, like the mimic sparring before the real bout begins. Through it all the prospective buyer sat in silence, his cigarette alternately paling or reddening through the ash with his inhalations. At last he spoke, with an air of finality, and they evidently got down to business. The gambler caught one or two French words,—francs and bateaux, whose meaning he had picked up on his travels.

Suddenly the incorrigible Carlotta who had been leaning forward, trying to decipher the paper, exclaimed:

"That's it. It's your phony island. Another map! Can you beat it! I didn't think there were other nuts loose in the world like you and Phil—m-m-m—I hope there aren't any squirrels loose on the island!"

"Keep quiet!" MacAllister meantime had cautioned, for her voice, almost raised to its usual pitch, sounded above the soft melodious flow of voices, as incongruously strident in this other world place as the vibrating jangle of a Jew's harp or a bit of latter day Jazz would have been.

The stranger turned, looked hardly in their direction, then pocketed the map. And "Linda," who had been watching them, whispered something in his ear.

After a phrase of warning to his guest, he lingered for a moment, occasionally uttering a sentence or two of apparent inconsequence. Then he paid the reckoning and entered the door of the main building of "The Café of Many Tongues."

"You're a beautiful fisherman," said Mac to Carlotta. "But I've got what I wanted. They're going to fit out a little expedition of their own, which, by the way, they'll never make."

Over the wall from the street came ribald conversation from two northern voices. The sulphurous exclamations were furnished by a third and very familiar pilgrim.

"Hell's Bells! but this is a blankety blank blank blankety sewer-hole! A regular cess-pool, says I. Blank blank me hide, if ever I ship under a kid without hair on his chest, a sky-pilot gambler with his sleeves full o' cards, and a high-kicking petticoat for Mate."

"It's the saw mouthed old divil," commented Carlotta. "What a bird of a stage-door keeper he'd make for the Old Boy!"

The three sailors rolled in through the gate from the street. Pushbutton Pete walked as if he had a full cargo, but fairly well-ballasted, shifting now and then so he listed a bit, but on the whole navigating very well. The scars on his face and forehead were flushed with heat and alcohol. The Pink Swede staggered sullenly behind, his heavy muscled pink torso stripped to the waist. The short figure of Old Man Veldmann stood swaying by the first table, his feet spread wide apart.

"Ye—dirty yellow rats, ye shriveled, miscarried spawn of black wenches, vamoose and make room for white men!" the fog-horn voice roared through the wicked saw-mouth. He spat on the sidewalk dangerously near the diners, swept the glasses off the near table, and took the panama from the head of a native, hurling it high up into a palm-tree, where it rested, ludicrously outlined against the starry sky.

A knife flashed, but MacAllister, who had swiftly glided forward from his place, knocked it from the insulted one's hand with a blow on the wrist.

"Ye little pint-pot, coffee-coloured shrimp!" roared the hoary old sinner, but MacAllister's hand was over his mouth, and, awed as usual by the superior coolness of their leader, they were hustled out of the courtyard before the angrily-chattering diners could attack them, Pushbutton Pete effectively guarding the rear of the retreat.

With a quick order to Pete to herd the two recalcitrants, MacAllister re-entered and hurried over to the table in the corner. It was growing late and the diners were beginning to leave, lazily sauntering away in groups of twos or threes. Phil was riveted to the table top, deep in feverish slumber, and the gambler and the girl had difficulty in getting him to his feet and steering him past the loungers, who still remained to sip what relief and forlorn pleasure they could from the dregs of the evening.

As they rejoined the group, they heard the voice of the girl Linda unsuccessfully pleading with the strange Frenchman, just inside the ancient doorway. He left her and slowly paced up the street towards the north, lost in some brooding memories of the past, or perhaps some faintly flickering hope of the future.

"Pete," whispered MacAllister, drawing that worthy aside, "that French boy is starting a little expedition of his own for our island. No first degree stuff—a week's lay-up will be enough. These greaser cops are as helpless as Secaucus constables, but it's better to play safe. So use discretion, Pete, use discretion!"

His husky lieutenant wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, shifted the lump from cheek to cheek, and hitched his trousers, as signals for action.

"I'll use somethin' on him all right," he answered, then disappeared up the street, shadowing the stranger around the corner of the northern end of "The Café of Many Tongues," and into a deserted alley that descended to the water. It was very dark here, and the only sounds were those of the wavelets whispering their secrets to the ancient walls.

Carlotta and MacAllister needed all their determination and tact to guide the protesting Phil, the pugnacious old man, and the Swede, southward along the irregular street. The polyglot babel had steadied to the snoring drone of many sleepers under the striped awnings on the uneven sidewalks, or in the narrow-windowed rooms above. They chose the middle of the highway, for the walk itself was clogged with huddled bodies; old and young, ragged and stark naked, human and canine, mingling together.

The provoking coolness of the stars was too far off. The hot moon hung low, and, instead of its usual cheering gold, had assumed a sickly saffron. The sleepers stirred uneasily and the tongues of the dogs lolled over their jaws, their little hearts beating sterterously like small machines that try the steep hills.

Three squalid squares they passed, then veered to the water's edge. At a wharf the gasoline launch lay moored, with a sailor in its cockpit. They entered and waited.

The heat of her room in the little café was unendurable, and Linda removed the few garments she wore, donning a flowing one of sheer white, then gathered up her quilt to descend to the cooler and now deserted courtyard.

She heard a muffled cry, stopped, her heart beating, then went to the narrow window that commanded the northern alley leading to the water, and looked down into its darkness.

Footsteps shuffled around the corner. The fugitive had gone. She strained her eyes and saw a body lying prone on the hard-baked earth. With a little cry she descended the stairs, crossed the yard and threshold of the gate, arms, ankles, and shoulders, slipping from their white sheath, and betraying the grace of her lithe body.

She ran up the street, turned into the alley. A mongrel sniffed at the face which lay on the edge of one of those half-dried green puddles. She looked into the still features. There was a dark stain upon them. Tenderly she gathered the head to her bosom, murmuring an incoherent jumble of love-cries.

Three squares up the Main Street and one turn to the right, Pushbutton Pete was taking his seat in the launch. With its cocky "put, put, put," the little boat moved on its course towards the steam yacht.

Pete wiped the sweat from his ugly scarred features, shifted the lump to the other cheek, and handed over a yellow paper.

"I used some of that there discretion you was tellin' about, Cap," he said.

1. Pronounced Leanda.